In normal circumstances she would have taken the subway, but as ugly as the mood had turned on the streets, she wasn’t about to risk getting trapped underground. At last she stood in front of the shithead’s door.

The tenement where he lived was in miserable condition. She breathed through her mouth and tried to ignore the used condom on the floor of the stairwell and the baby squalling two apartments down. After she did this one last thing and she stopped by work to say good-bye to Quentin, she was so out of here.

The door yanked open. Her fist was moving before she had fully laid eyes on him. He doubled over as she punched him in the stomach.

He wheezed and coughed. “Fuck, bitch!”

“Ow!” She shook open her fist. Thumb outside, not inside, dummy.

He straightened and glared at her as he rubbed his abdomen. Then he started to smile. “You did it, didn’t you? You actually, really did it.”

“Like you gave me a choice,” she snapped. She shoved at his shoulder. It knocked him back enough so she could stalk inside and slam the door shut.

His smile turned into a gleeful laugh. He fist-pumped the air. “Yes!”

Pia regarded him, her gaze bitter. Shithead, aka Keith Hollins, had amiable good looks with shaggy dishwater blond hair and a surfer’s body. His cocky grin had women flocking to him like flies to honey.

She had been one of those flies once. Then disillusionment had set in. She had thought him kind when he was charming. She had taken his caressing manner for real affection and called him boyish when the truth was he was selfish to the bone. He was Captain Fantastic in his own mind. He created the fiction that he was a risk taker when in reality he was a gambling addict.

She had broken up with him a few months back. Then just last week his betrayal had punched her in the teeth, but it felt like much longer.

Pia had been so lonely since her mother died six years ago. There was not another single creature who knew her for who and what she was. Only her mother had known. Her mother had loved her so much she had devoted her life to safeguarding Pia’s welfare and safety. She had raised her daughter with a fanatical attention to secrecy and with every protection spell she could muster or buy.

Then Pia had thrown away almost everything her mom had taught her for a sweet smile and the promise of some affection. I’m so sorry, Mom, she said in her head. I swear I’ll do better now. She stared at Keith doing a touchdown shimmy. He pretended to slam a football on the ground and grinned at her.

“I know I had that punch comin’ to me. I owed you one. No hard feelings, sugar.”

“Speak for yourself.” Pia’s words were coated in frost. “I’ve all kinds of hard feelings going on over here.”

She dropped her backpack to the floor and glanced around even though she was pretty sure they were alone. Fast-food wrappers littered the thrift store coffee table. A dirty T-shirt draped the back of the couch. Some things never changed.

“Aw, come on, P., there’s no need to be like that. Hey, listen, I know you’re still pissed, but you gotta understand somethin’, sugar. I did this for us.” He reached for her shoulder, but she jerked back before his fingers could touch her. His smile dimmed, but he didn’t lose his easy, caressing manner. “P., you don’t seem to get it. We’re gonna be rich now. Really f**king rich. Why, you can have anything you want. Won’t you like that, darlin’?”

Keith was the one who didn’t get it. The dimwit didn’t realize he was collateral damage. He had constructed this fantasy world in which he was a player while his gambling debts grew worse, and he fell more and more under the control of his business associates.

Those “associates” were shadowy connections a couple times removed from Keith’s bookie. She imagined them as a cackle of hyenas gathering around their prey with languid purpose. Keith was lunch, but they had decided to play with their food before the kill.

She didn’t know who his contacts were and she didn’t want to. It was awful enough that she knew there was real Power somewhere up that food chain. Human or Elven, Wyr or Fae, it didn’t matter. Something nasty had turned its attention this way. It had enough magic and muscle to take on one of the premiere Powers of the world.

And here was Captain Fantastic, a mere human with not a single spark of Power in him and not a lick of sense, either. The fact that she had ever hooked up with him, even for a few months, would keep her humble forever.

She told him, “You sound like the dialogue from a bad movie.”

Keith’s flirtatious manner fell away and he glared at her. “Yeah? Well, f**k you too.”

“And it goes on,” she sighed. A headache had begun to pulse in her sinuses. “Look, let’s get this over with. Your handlers wanted me to steal something from Cuelebre—”

“I bet my associates that I could get them anything from anywhere,” Keith sneered. “And they suggested something from Cuelebre.”

Today had been a long bad day on top of a long bad week. It had started the moment Keith had put an object of Power in her hand and told her she was going to find Cuelebre’s lair with it. The shock still clung as she remembered the pulse of serious magic that had seared her hand.

The feeling was compounded by a rush of terror for whoever, or whatever, had the kind of mojo to create that artifact and hand it to Keith.

That was sure a special moment, when she discovered Keith had betrayed her. When she realized that, between Cuelebre and the cackle of hyenas, she was screwed. If she stole from Cuelebre, she was dead. If she didn’t, she had no doubt Keith would tell his hyenas, and she was still dead. Rock, shake hands with hard place.

Having the charm sit in her hand was like holding on to a cluster bomb. The design had been deceptively simple. It had felt like a finding charm with a onetime activation, but it had had the Power to slice through all of Cuelebre’s protections.

Her breath shook as she remembered the terrible walk she had taken earlier that day, through an innocent sunlit city park where coffee-drinking adults watched over shrieking children as they threw sand and pelted from the merry-go-round to the jungle gym.

The sounds of traffic and barking dogs had punctuated the blistering pain in her hand, as the charm’s activated Power flared and drew her along a flower-lined path to an anonymous, utterly forgettable rusted metal maintenance door set into a park viaduct. The charm drew a thin shimmering path that led through an invisible mist of cloaking and aversion spells, which had her convinced with increasing urgency that she was lost, mistaken, cursed, trapped in her worst nightmare, in mortal danger, damned for all eternity—

Pia’s fragile control snapped. She slapped Keith’s chest with both flattened hands, driving him backward a few feet. “You blackmailed me into stealing from a dragon, you ass**le!” she shouted. She pushed him again and he staggered back. “I trusted you with my secrets.” Although not all of them, thank the gracious Powers, not all. She’d somehow retained a few last scraps of self-preservation. “I thought we loved each other. God, what a wretched joke. I could crawl under a rock and die from embarrassment, except you. Are. Not. Worth it.”

Her last shove knocked Keith into a wall. The look on his face would have been comical if she’d had a sense of humor left.

His astonishment turned ugly. His hands shot out faster than she expected. He shoved her back so hard she tripped and almost fell. “Well, I must have done a good goddamn job of faking it,” he snarled. “Because you’ve got to be the most miserable f**k I’ve ever had.”

Pia never knew until that moment that she was capable of killing someone. Her hands curled into claws. “I am an excellent f**k,” she hissed. “I am the best thing that ever happened to your sorry, deluded, preejaculating ass. You just didn’t have the good taste to recognize it. And you know what? Now I don’t even know why I put up with you. I had a better sex life with five minutes and my hand in a hot shower.”

Captain Fantastic’s face turned puce. She stared. She’d never seen that color on a person before. He cocked back his arm as if to hit her.

“You do that and you never get what you want. Plus you lose a hand.” The frost in her voice turned to an ice pick. He froze. The ruthless stranger that had taken over her body brought her up nose to nose with him. “Go ahead,” she said, settling into a soft and even tone. “Amputation might be a little therapeutic right now.”

She stared him down until he dropped his hand and took a half step back. The move wasn’t much, but it meant a lot to her battered pride. In a contest of wills she’d pinned him to the mat.

“Let’s get this over with,” he snapped.

“About time.” She dug into her jeans and gave him a folded piece of paper. “You get what I stole when you read that out loud.”

“What?” He gave her a blank look. It was clear things had taken a turn beyond his comprehension. As a nonmagical human he couldn’t feel how the paper glowed with Power from the binding spell.

He unfolded it and scanned the contents, and his face contorted again with rage. He dropped the paper like it was on fire. “Oh no, bitch. This isn’t gonna f**kin’ happen. You’re gonna give me what you took and give it to me NOW!” He lunged for her backpack. She took several quick steps back, letting him rifle through the contents. Wallet, tennis shoes, the half-empty bottle of water and her iPod spilled onto the floor.

He made an incoherent strangled noise and rounded on her. She danced back another step and kept on her toes, both empty hands held up as she gave him a mocking smile.

“Where is it!” Spittle flew. “What did you take? Where did you hide it? FUCK!”

“You said it didn’t matter,” she said. As Keith advanced on her, she kept moving in counterpart, keeping a few feet between them. “You said your keepers—”

“Associates!” he roared, fisting his hands.

“—didn’t care what I took as long as it was from Cuelebre, since they had the means to verify the take. I suppose that means they can spell it somehow to prove it really is from him.” The back of her shin came in contact with the coffee table. She gathered herself and sprang backward as Keith made a lunge for her. She put a lot of push into her jump and landed in a crouch on the couch as Keith stumbled into the table. “And you know what?” she said. “I don’t give a damn, except for one thing.”

Pia paused and straightened. She bounced a little as Keith scrambled back to his feet. His good surfer looks had twisted into an expression of hate.

She wondered if it would occur to him that her backward jump had been too far and high for a normal human woman to make, but she supposed none of that mattered anymore.

“The thing about blackmail is it never stops at just one payment. All the TV shows say so, anyway,” she said. She didn’t know she had any more disappointment left until her stomach sank at the cunning expression that flashed in Keith’s eyes. “Did you think I wouldn’t guess you meant to keep using me? After all, why would you stop at just one theft? It was always going to be like, ‘Hey, Pia, I’ll keep quiet about you if you’ll do just one more little thing for me.’ Wasn’t it?”

His top lip curled. “We could have been a real partnership.”

He had the gall to sound bitter. Unbelievable. She dropped her flippant tone and became serious. “Either you would keep blackmailing me, or sooner or later—if you haven’t already—you would tell your owners about me. Or”—she held up a finger—“how about this scenario? You’re going to give them what I stole, which will prove to them you were doing more than just idle boasting. It’s going to make them take you seriously.”

His mouth tightened. “They already take me seriously, bitch.”

“Riiight.” She continued, “They probably promised to wipe out all your gambling debts if you could pull off the theft. Maybe they said they’d give you a good chunk of cash as well. You’re hoping this will save your miserable hide. Then they’ll finally sit up and give you the kind of attention you deserve. They’ll have to take you as a real player and not some chump up to his ears in bad debt. But don’t you see—if that happens, they’re also going to get seriously interested in how you pulled it off. They’re going to want to ask you a lot of questions.”

The anger faded from Keith’s face as what she said sank in. “It wasn’t going to be like that,” he said. “I didn’t tell them hardly anything about you.”

Hallelujah, it looked like he was turning thoughtful. Or what passed for thoughtfulness, for him. She relaxed enough to step off the couch and sit down. “You know, I think I believe you on that,” she said. “At least I think you believe it. But what you ‘hardly didn’t tell’ was already too much.”

She could see how his thought process would have gone. He was going to retain all the power. He would keep her strung along in a pseudo-partnership where he held all the strings and got her to do whatever he wanted. His “associates” were going to be admiring and respectful. He probably thought he would end up being a real broker for them too and get them whatever they wanted for exorbitant fees. Then Keith was going to get to live the good life.

“Okay,” she said, scraping at the dregs of her flagging energy to adopt a brisk attitude. She braced her hands on her thighs. “We have to step outside of Keith’s fantasy land now. Here’s how it’s going to be. You swore you would keep what I said in confidence. This is all about keeping a dishonest man honest. You blackmailed me, so now I’m blackmailing you, because however you look at the scenarios I just painted, I’d be screwed.”